On 19 May 2023, local news portal MOST, based in the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, had been the victim of a DDoS attack for the second day in a row, reported Kyiv-based press freedom group Institute of Mass Information (IMI). “Yesterday and the day before yesterday morning, the site was attacked particularly hard, it went offline for several hours. Even now, the load on the server is abnormally high, but the site is working”, MOST editor-in-chief Serhiy Nikitenko said. According to IMI, MOST suspects that local officials in Kherson could be behind the attack, as the media had reportedly earlier received proposals to delete articles from its site againt payment. Russian hackers could also be responsible, MOST claimed, connecting the attack to recent ones against the websites of local authorities in the nearby region of Odesa, in the course of which hackers posted a message attempting to discredit Ukraine’s resistance against Russia’s invasion.